Sheba

40
WRITING THE OLD TESTAMENT
years, was accused of altering original texts to denigrate the House of
David, thereafter presenting the forgery as if it had been faithfully copied
from very ancient and revered temple documents.
Such literary meddling matches the hypothesis put forward by the
German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Wellhausen, writing at the
close of the nineteenth century, concluded that the first six books of the Old
Testament had been written by four different groups of people. The earliest
group, called the Yahwist, wrote about the reigns of David and Solomon,
the kingdom of Judah, and the House of David. The second group, known
as the Elohist, recorded the period of the divided monarchy and the
kingdom of Israel. The third group, called the Deuteronomist, wrote about
Josiah’s draconian activities on behalf of the Zadokites, the time of exile,
and the work of Ezra. The last group, known as the Priestly, covered the
exile and postexilic periods, and also propagated the interests of the
Jerusalem priesthood. Biblical scholars have generally accepted
Wellhausen’s ideas.
Most authorities also agree with another German Biblical scholar,
Martin Noth (1902-1968), who, in 1930, wrote that many different
traditions and manuscripts existed separately until Ezra’s time (ca. 400
B.C.E.) when the Jerusalem theocracy codified the Torah and added other
books to produce the “standard” version of the Old Testament.
Unfortunately nothing survives from that period. The oldest fragments of
Old Testament manuscripts, which date from ca. 200 B.C.E., were
discovered in the early 1950s among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The contents of the Old Testament, as canonized by Ezra and his
successors, consist of twenty-four sacred books originally written on
twenty-four scrolls. The Old Testament of the King James Bible divides the
books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles each into two parts and lists the
twelve books of the so-called minor prophets separately, making 39 books
in all. The Old Testament of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches
contains eighty-one books; some texts - such as Jubilees and Enoch - were
lost to the Jews in earlier times and are now only available in Ge’ez, the
ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are also
references in the Old Testament to other books, now lost, such as the Book
of Jashar, and the Acts of Solomon. The Bible of the Roman Catholic
Church contains other writings later than the last book of the Hebrew Old
Testament. These are known as the Apocrypha.
The contents of the Old Testament cover approximately 2000 years or
more and were produced at different stages. The Torah - Genesis, Exodus,